See if you can spot the common thread in the following passages, beyond the fact that they all appear in Lisa Beyer’s TIME article, “Why The Middle East Crisis Isn’t Really About Terrorism.”
On U.S. policy toward repaying Hizballah for its previous attacks on American targets:
The time appears to be now. By supporting Israel’s ferocious
offensive against Hizballah in Lebanon, especially by pushing back
international efforts to broker a cease-fire in order to give the
Israeli military more time to lay waste to the group’s fighters and
armaments, Washington has taken a forceful swing at the militia, even
if it’s by proxy. It’s not exactly about avenging the Marines, of
course. It’s about fighting the global war on terrorism.
Or is it? Should it be?
On the nature of the terrorist threat:
However grand it may be to fight all global terrorists, though, the simple fact is that we can’t: we don’t have the troops, the money or the political will. That means it may make sense to limit our hit list to the groups that actually threaten us. Hizballah does not now do that. Nor does the other group currently in the spotlight, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. The U.S. has sound reasons for wanting to constrain these groups, principally that they threaten our ally Israel. But those reasons have largely gone unarticulated as Bush falls back on maxims about the need to confront terrorism, as if Hizballah and Hamas are likely to be behind the next spectacular that will top 9/11. They are not, and pretending that they are costs the U.S. credibility, risks driving terrorist groups that aren’t allied into alliance and obscures the real issues at hand in the Middle East….
How about this one?
Moreover, by casting the battle against Hizballah as part of the war on terrorism, the Administration is obscuring the real questions in this crisis and depriving the American public of a debate over them: How much should we do for Israel, and what should we do to Iran, Hizballah’s main source of funding, training and weaponry? The fundamental problem with Hizballah is not that it is a terrorist group, as the President has said repeatedly in recent weeks. The fundamental problem the U.S. should have with Hizballah is that it refuses to stop fighting our principal ally in the region, despite Israel’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. And Hizballah can keep up the fight because it is sponsored by a state that, with its nuclear program, really does present a danger to the U.S. The backers of the Administration argue that the U.S., through Israel, needs to slap back Hizballah in order to smack Iran. But does Israel’s whacking Hizballah really deliver a blow to Iran on behalf of the U.S. any more than a medieval duel of seconds settles who is the superior of two knights? It’s a discussion worth having, if we can sort out our real interests and purposes in this affair.
I apologize for the long quotations, but they’re included for effect. None of these long passages has a bit of attribution. That’s a big problem for a story packaged as “news.”
In news stories — as opposed to opinion pieces (like the one-page “counterpoint” Charles Krauthammer offers to balance the four-page “news” article) — a basic journalistic tenet calls for a reporter to answer the question, “Says who?”
In other parts of the story, Ms. Beyer shares direct and indirect quotes from French diplomats and some Rand Corporation sources. But most of her story consists of passages like the ones quoted above.
Readers of all political stripes should sound the alarm bells whenever they’re left continually asking “Says who?”
